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A little confused about the scoring in the situations shown. It says the Cloister must be surrounded by land on all sides. In both cases illustrated, one of the six tiles surrounding the Cloister tile is technically an all-city tile. I thought since a solid wall was made that this is okay - the Cloister is still technically surrounded by grass. My partner thought it wouldn't count as no land exists on that tile. Any ideas here?

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Having examined the rules now, I think it's pretty clear that a "land tile" is any tile at all. Land is still land even with a city built on top of it! If there was a requirement for the Cloister to be surrounded by actual green, the rules would presumably specify "field" or "farm" instead of "land tile".
–
thesunneversetsJun 9 '11 at 16:44

2 Answers
2

I believe "tile" and "land tile" are synonymous. The rules for scoring cloisters states:

A cloister is complete when the tile it is on is completely surrounded by land tiles.

And the rules for drawing tiles is (emphasis mine):

Placing land tiles

First a player must draw a land tile from one of the face-down stacks.

As you can see, tiles are referred to as "land tiles" when drawing. We can then infer that "tiles" and "land tiles" are the same thing. So a cloister only has to be surrounded by tiles, not specifically tiles with grass on them.

Yes, that cloister is complete and can be scored. Cloisters earn points per tile touching them, with nothing specifying what kind of tile it is.

For some reason the rules says "Land tile." It is referring to any kind of tile you can place. If, by placing a "land tile," a cloister is completely surrounded by tiles (including The River tiles, the starting tile, etc.), then it is completed.

Here are pertinent scoring rules:

Cloister completed during the game - 9
points Cloister at end of game - 1
point for each tile (cloister tile and
each surrounding tile)

...

If, by placing the land tile, cloisters, roads, and/or cities are completed, they are now scored.

As far as I can tell, the phrase "Land tile" is only to distinguish it from "starting tile." Weird.